When we say gender is performed, we usually mean that weve taken on a role or were acting in some way and that our acting or our role playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world.

The state or global forms of power that seek to protect populations considered in danger may well extend their own power through those acts of protection.

To operate within the matrix of power is not the same as to replicate uncritically relations of domination.

Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.

Genocide is not a legitimate option. It's not ok to decide that an entire population has no right to live in the world. No matter whether these relationships are very proximate or very distant, there is no entitlement to expunge a population or to demean its basic humanity.

No matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to standards that we recognize as just. Justice is not revenge - it's deciding for a solution that is oriented towards peace, peace being the harder but more human way of reacting to injury. That is the very basis of the idea of rights.